The Italian critic Roberto Calasso conceals his complex literary thaumaturgy behind the veil of conventional biography and in his most recently translated book, La Folie Baudelaire, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) performs a role analogous to that played by Talleyrand in his 1983 study La rovina di Kasch, acting as a focal point for this expansive cultural exposé of 19th-century Paris. From a masterful biographical portrait of Baudelaire, the narrative spins out, via a discussion of the latter's 1863 critical essay The Painter of Modern Life, to consider subjects as myriad as the airlessness of Ingres's neoclassicism, Chateaubriand's complaints about "the vulgarity… of passports" and the African exile of French poetry's enfant terrible, Arthur Rimbaud.

Calasso's prose is sometimes hampered by his tendency to justify argument entirely through proper nouns – Delacroix, for instance, bears the stamp of the 18th century "more in the manner of Voltaire than Rousseau" – but his eye for illuminating anecdote is peerless. Thus he informs us of Alberthe de Rubempré who "was the mistress, in rapid succession, of Delacroix, Stendhal and Mérimée", before waspishly adding: "Each of them spoke too well of her to his best friend – and was then promptly ousted by him." Yet Calasso's passion for the ostensibly peripheral is not confined to the roguishly humorous, as his astounding unveiling of the "violent silence" of Degas's 1865 painting Scène de guerre au Moyen Âge demonstrates.

The book's title plays on the dual definitions of "la folie", a word denoting both madness and a type of 18th-century rural pavilion. Madness is certainly present in this meandering genealogy of modernity but there is method too. Calasso quotes Proust's claim that "in all the arts… talent lies in the artist's drawing nearer to the subject to be expressed" and, in this sense, La Folie Baudelaire is a concrete triumph, for its recreation of Baudelaire's milieu is so intensely vivid as to miraculously transform the distantly anecdotal into the seemingly actual.

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